So why is there no comparable railway network in those largeish US states that are comparable to EU countries? Or in the many (almost all of them) states that are smaller than France and Japan?
The reason why we have such shitty HSR on the NEC boils down to two reasons: one, the corridor is too congested with commuter rail (particularly in Connecticut), and two, the route was rebuilt to "modern" standards in the 1930s. Rebuilding it again to truly modern 220 mph HSR standards involves needing to find virgin right-of-way in Connecticut, which is neither easy nor cheap.
The Northeast US has a similar statistical density as areas of Europe but looks so much physically different. Take some time on Google Earth and check it out. There is a nonstop blob of suburbs that go almost all the way from DC to Boston. In a proposed train network, most of the population has a long trip to the central station before they can take the train to the other city. They still need a car, and need somewhere to park it. In Europe or Asia cities are more concentrated, and the countrysides are less populated.
Building a center-city to center-city train network in the US is not impossible, but it simply wouldn't be as efficient as it would be in Europe or Asia because of the way the cities are designed.
I very much agree we need a new approach to planning an zoning. We need to focus on that first. It could take longer than a generation to transition away from the suburban model.
Many Americans prefer the freedom of being able to go A to B at any time without needing to wait at a bus/subway stop or hoping the transportation system is still running for the day. The amount of money it would cost to get the entire country walk able or reachable by public transit would be astronomical.
That's probably true (modulo taxis, even if you rule out public transport), but it's just as true when you fly from Kansas City to Houston. Which is why airports always come with car rental, and it works out for those who want a car. If a car is really needed at the destination, arrangements could and should be made to have car rentals available at the train station.
I mean... the shitty high speed rail we have (Acela) does it in an hour and 8 minutes. Making it 55 minutes probably won't change travel patterns substantially. (Although route upgrades to support that is the medium term plan)
And SD - SF should be less than 4 hours, making it faster than a flight (if you count all the time wasted at the airports).
Or, better yet, you use (now non-existing) public transportation to go around.
For people living to Syracuse, tons of times. Equally many times with any EU train that connects e.g. Paris to a city within 50 or 100 or 200 miles.
>And if you built a train to Syracuse, what would you do once you got there (without a car)? The city is the centerpiece of a region with a million people, less than 1/6 of whom live inside the city?
If it's "a million people" it should be able to afford its own public transport connected to the train station, which answers the question "what to do there without a car".
It's not like there aren't places in Europe, Asia etc that are exactly like this...
What shocked me about my recent trips abroad (to Munich and Tokyo) was that those cities were completely different. You drive a bit out of Munich and the city just ends and becomea farm land. Even with Tokyo there ia farmland between the city and Narita. In the US, it’a sprawl in every direction, and most of the population lives in that sprawl, and not in the city.
Well, not quite: "At the 2010 census, the city population was 145,252, and its metropolitan area had a population of 662,577". There are places like that in Europe.
In Greece Athens has a population of 600,000 people and the surrounding metropolitan area is 4 million -- of continuous sprawl in every direction.
Far more often than you'd think. If such a system existed people would use it all the time.
Look at the metra lines that go from Chicago to the suburbs in the north/northwest. People take those all the time because living in those areas is significantly cheaper.
People would be able to visit families long distance without needing to own a car or cough up for a plane ticket. That land in the US is vast is not really a good excuse.
Being able to conveniently take the train from Chicago -> Iowa would be great, especially if the route went further.
Yes, Amtrak runs from DC, Baltimore, Philly, NYC, and Boston. But, it’s not high speed (except a few sections on the Acela train). And the subways and neighborhood lines are lacking.
Take DC for example... the Metro single tracks and stops at every station. No express route across town. And trains only run every 20 minutes off-peak (and that’s assuming they haven’t shut the whole thing down because it’s caught on fire again). So, getting from Tyson’s Corner or Bethesda to Union Station is not fast.
An regular train from the inner business centers to Union Ststion, plus a proper bullet train to NYC would make a suitable substitute for flying. Right now, rail just isn’t a workable option for many business travelers.
From Washington Dulles airport, approximately 265k passengers per year fly to Boston. Another 715k fly DCA-BOS. DCA-LGA accounts for 318k. DCA-JFK, IAD-LGA and IAD-JFK do not crack top-ten lists of busiest domestic routes for their origins.
To get a feel for just Acela (which is not the only Northeast Corridor train service), it's slightly less than the annual passenger volume by air SFO-LAX, SFO-JFK and SFO-BOS combined.
The entire Northeast Corridor carries approximately 12M passengers per year. If it were operated by air, it would be the second-busiest route in the world by passenger volume, slotting between CJU-GMP in Korea (13M/year) and MEL-SYD in Australia (9M/year).
In 2012, the New York Times reported that 75 percent of travelers between New York and Washington used one of Amtrak's Northeast Corridor trains (Acela isn't the only one), and between New York and Boston 54 percent used a train:
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/16/business/hassles-of-air-t...
There certainly are things that could be improved. But Amtrak's operations in the northeast are not some hypothetical potential maybe-someday competitor to air travel. They are and for years have been a real and significant competitor to air travel.
And for what it's worth, Amtrak also has a farebox recovery ratio for its entire nationwide network that hovers around 95%, second in the US only to BART Oakland Airport Connector (96%).